


Rampant Hunger, Roving Feet

by Azzandra



Series: a life less led [3]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Cannibalism, Death, Gen, Marked Character (Dishonored), Tyvia (Dishonored), Violence, it's Halloween month so this feels like the appropriate time to post this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 12:57:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16347161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: If the world is cruel enough, then people can become nothing more than links in a chain of cruelty.





	Rampant Hunger, Roving Feet

**Author's Note:**

> This story stands mostly on its own from the other two in the series (which are about Billie and the Outsider and their domestic life after DOTO). It's also, uhhhhh, a lot less optimistic than the other two stories, so if that's what you're into, you might want to check those out!
> 
> This one is about two Marked OCs mentioned in those fics, so that's the only reason I'm putting it in the same series. Also this takes place in Tyvia, and I've had to do some worldbuilding of my own, so this is going to be a trip. But if you're into that, please enjoy!

"Hang them," the baron ordered.

So the Watchmen shrugged, and went to measure out the rope. Nobody was going to argue.

They were Tyvian, of course, and every Tyvian was entitled to a trial. But the roads were snowed in this time of year. It would take two weeks traveling over harsh land to reach the nearest town with a magistrate and a courthouse. And in truth, who was going to miss a handful of bandits, as ragged and starved as the people they were robbing? Not even their own mothers, the Watchmen would have wagered.

So they measured out the rope. They tied the nooses. And they brought the lot of them to the hanging tree.

"Ladies first," the red-nosed Watchman said, lips pulled back in a mocking sneer more than a smile.

Yelena stepped forward. She was still young, and somewhat pretty in a peasant sort of way: dark hair and dark eyes, features typical for Northern Tyvia, and the early crow's feet of a hard life already crinkling the corners of her eyes.

"Well, 'least someone remembers their manners," she said, and it was shrill bravado more than dignity. There was no dignity in a hanging death.

The five other condemned men were stonily silent, one of them weeping soundlessly. Yelena wasn't going to cry, though it was her husband who'd run away and left them all to hang. She wasn't going to cry a tear for herself, much less for that bastard. 'I'll kill him one day,' Yelena thought instead, nonsensical because she wasn't going to get the opportunity to do anything ever again. 'I'll kill him.'

She thought it even as the Watchman fit the rope around her neck, keeping the words in her mind like a talisman against fear.

'I'll kill him!' she thought again, as the stool was knocked from under her feet. She wasn't lucky enough to snap her neck, though the sudden burst of pain when the rope went taut under her weight was worse than she could imagine. No, it would be the slow choking for her. Typical, Yelena thought, that everything in her life would be the hard way, up to her death.

Oh, but it was coming. Yelena felt it, with every aching breath she couldn't draw in. She felt it drain from her. She felt the cold of the Void encroaching. She was close.

And then-- it stopped.

She stood not in the baron's field, not hanging from the noose, but on a chunk of floating rock, along a low stone wall that broke off into a deep, infinite twilight.

"Th' fuck," Yelena said, her tongue thick in her mouth.

"Bad day, Yelena?" The question dripped down her spine like wax from a candle, and Yelena startled, her hand going to her hip, where her pistol would have been.

The Outsider smeared into existence, floating just off to Yelena's side, and he tilted his head at her life she was some interesting bug.

"Or bad life, really," he continued.

Yelena would have snapped something in response, but she found that impulse much muted when she was this close to death.

"Is this what you pictured when you thought anything would be better than living out your life in that sad little village you were born in? Is this how you thought death would do you part, when you married the first dashing rogue to wink your way? Tell me, Yelena, is this how your story ends?" the Outsider asked. 

"No such thing as a good death, anyway," Yelena muttered, once it became obvious he actually wanted a response. Her voice was rougher than usual, but then, that was not surprising.

"Maybe," the Outsider conceded. "But would you like to try again?"

The back of Yelena's hand burned.

 

* * *

 

Yelena dropped, knees knocking hard against the frozen ground, the impact jarring as it traveled up her body. Her first breaths were sharp agony, air whistling past her teeth like a curse she couldn't voice.

The Watchmen startled, their eyes flicking up to the noose, then back down at her, and their jaws hung slack. Yelena's fellow condemned regarded her with wild, bristling hope in their eyes.

Yelena rose, and her body felt like pins and needles all over, hurting inside and out, but underneath it all was a strange vigor, a dizzying rush of power.

Her hands had been tied behind her back, but they passed through the rope as easily as her neck had passed through the noose. The black symbol etched on the back of her left hand glowed blue, though she barely noticed. She strode towards the Watchmen instead, gripped by a mad courage she couldn't explain.

The Watchmen snarled. The nearest one took out his pistol and aimed for Yelena--shot off once, twice. Yelena did not break her stride, as calm as a frozen lake. There was no blood, no burning pain. The bark of the hanging tree shuddered under the impact of the bullets, instead of Yelena's face splitting apart under the volley of hot metal. The bullets passed through her as they would have through a ghost.

And Yelena walked right up to the Watchman, punching him in the face and wrenching the pistol from his hand while the man was still staring at her incredulously.

The other two Watchmen, equally shocked, fumbled for their pistols. Yelena aimed, took three shots, exquisitely precise. She tugged a sword out of the nearest Watchman's scabbard as he screamed and pressed hands to his bloodied face, and what followed wasn't a fight, but simple butchery. 

When it was over, the five condemned men looked at her with grave eyes. Ulrik had stopped crying, his blotchy face turning pale instead.

"The baron hangs," Yelena pronounced, her voice a rough wheeze through her damaged throat. 

They did not argue with her.

 

* * *

 

The man who staggered out of the woods was gaunt-faced, his blond hair hanging in greasy strings over his eyes. His hands were thin, almost skeletal, the tips of his fingers blue. The fur coat he wore was stained with blood down the back, though he had no wound.

He collapsed just at the edge of Mr. and Mrs. Tsernov's property, near the treeline, where they could see him through the kitchen window.

Mr. and Mrs. Tsernov, aged eighty-seven and ninety-one respectively, traded a long look, which over six decades of marriage had come to communicate a great many things. This would not be the first unfortunate soul to crawl out of the woods from that direction over the years, and any discussion this situation warranted had been had and rehashed and closed long ago.

So Mr. Tsernov took out the wood sleigh to haul the young man over to the house, and Mrs. Tsernov began boiling water on the stove.

"Poor winter for this kind of thing," Mrs. Tsernov muttered as her husband passed by, and he understood her meaning, but had nothing to say.

Their house was just off the village path and over a hillock, keeping it out of sight of the rest of the villagers. At times like this, it was a useful thing. The winter had been cruel and long. The wild animals were growing desperate, but still did not tear into humans as badly as humans tore into each other.

The young man was so reduced by hunger and cold that Mr. Tsernov had no great difficulty hauling him into the kitchen. The Tsernovs' house still had an old-fashion clay hearth, and a bed set against it, because they slept in the kitchen whenever one or both of them was ill. It was now relinquished to the young man, who was stripped of his fur coat and bundled into bed.

Mrs. Tsernov stoked the fire as Mr. Tsernov inspected the label sewn inside the coat collar, soaked in blood. The owner had died of a head wound, most likely, though that was an assumption more than anything. Head wounds did tend to bleed profusely even when they were not fatal.

"He stole a wagon guard's coat, it seems. I wonder how he managed that?" Mr. Tsernov said out loud, then turned the coat over to inspect the dark, crusted stain. Rust-red flakes shed away from the stain, and Mr. Tsernov's mouth pulled down in a frown.

It had been clever of him to take a guard's coat. The coats they gave to prisoners were flimsy by comparison, just functional enough to keep them alive for the journey. The man had pulled the guardsman's coat over it, and it had probably kept him from freezing completely. The blue tinge was already receding from his fingers as he rested, and the warmth of the hearth seeped into him.

"Desperation can make monsters of anyone, no matter how innocent they start off," Mrs. Tsernov said. She took the coat away from her husband, bundling it up and shoving it under the bed. "Better not to dwell on it."

Mr. Tsernov's brow smoothed at his wife's words, and he nodded, quick to agree with her. He preferred not dwelling on ugly things, as she very well knew. He left that kind of thinking to Mrs. Tsernov.

The young man awoke bewildered but placid, his eyes large and blue and bloodshot.

Mrs. Tsernov handed him a plate with a slice of kholodets, and he stared at it as if he did not know what it was. Perhaps he did not. Maybe he was from the city, where they had more fashionable dishes, and they didn't have to use every table scrap twice over to survive the winter.

"Eat it," Mrs. Tsernov said imperiously, and the young man shakily picked up a fork. He used it to poke at the gelatin encasing the bits of meat, apparently unsure if it was edible. "Eat all of it," Mrs. Tsernov said again.

He scooped a forkful of gelatin into his mouth, gumming at it with a distant sort of dismay on his face.

"What's your name, boy?" she asked though he was hardly a boy. He wasn't a terribly young man either, for that matter, but Mrs. Tsernov was old enough to get away with calling anyone she damn well pleased 'boy'.

"Leopold," he answered, his voice rough. He eschewed a last name for now.

"Escaped from the prisoner wagons, have you?" Mrs. Tsernov continued, her voice pleasant.

Fear passed over the luminous blue of his eyes, like a cloud blotting the sun.

"Not the first one we've had come from that-a-ways," Mrs. Tsernov continued. "The prison wagons have used the mountain pass here for as long as I remember, and I have a long memory. The smart ones always try to escape before they reach the prison camps."

Leopold grunted in his throat, sounding unconvinced, but turned his nose back into his plate and shoveled food in his face, a bit more decisively.

"There was a landslide," Leopold said after a long stretch of silence. "M-Most of the wagons got crushed, the... the horses... their legs all twisted..." He stared blankly into his plate for a while. "I shouldn't have run."

"How long was your sentence?" Mrs. Tsernov asked, not unkindly.

"Twelve years," he admitted, and gave a dry, bitter laugh. "I just... I wanted to do my time and go back to Dabokva. I wasn't planning on escaping. I wasn't thinking on it until I... woke up. Everything was smashed."

Mrs. Tsernov clicked her tongue, patting Leopold's shoulder.

"What's done is done," she said in the end. "Twelve years in prison might've been less kind to you than life as a fugitive. There's no going back now."

"My apologies," he said, staring mournfully into his plate. Despite his initial distaste, he'd eaten all of the kholodets and scraped the plate clean. "You shouldn't put yourself at risk like this, having a fugitive under your roof."

Mrs. Tsernov cackled in response.

"Oh, dear boy, you think we're the one in danger?" she asked.

Leopold blinked uncertainly under Mrs. Tsernov's pitying look.

"Nobody here cares for crimes done somewhere far away, or for us giving you shelter. Being a fugitive isn't the danger, my boy, no... It's being a stranger that will do you in if anyone sees you."

"What... do you mean?" Leopold asked slowly.

Mrs. Tsernov's expression drained of any mirth, and she walked slowly towards the window, peering through the curtains into the while hell beyond.

"Hard winters bring out the savagery in every living thing, around these parts," she said slowly. "The wolves, the bears, coming down from the mountains to eat our animals--or our neighbors. Even the deer will take a chunk out of you, given the opportunity. But the _people_..."

Mrs. Tsernov's lip curled in distaste.

"There have been hard winters before. Harder than this one, though not many. The heavy snows come, the hunting gets scarce, the cellars go empty... In years past, people would go to the local landlord, hat in hand. The landlord's larders were always full, after all. And he'd give them a little something, oh yes. A sack of grain, a side of pork, just enough to line the stomach for a week. And he'd put their names down in his ledgers, to work the debt off in labor the next year, sowing his fields and harvesting his crops. Even a mild winter sends at least a few people to the landlord's doorstep. He always has people to tend his fields and his animals. His larder and his ledger both make sure of it."

Mrs. Tsernov turned back to Leopold, watching carefully as his brow furrowed.

"That's extortion," Leopold said, appalled. 

"It is survival," Mrs. Tsernov replied. "You are from the city, so there are many things you won't understand here."

"But you talk about him in the past tense," Leopold pointed out.

"Yes," Mrs. Tsernov said, then added, more quietly, "Yes."

She moved away from the window, taking out a bottle of pear brandy and a couple of glasses from a cabinet. She sat down heavily in a chair, on the opposite side of the table from Leopold. 

"The Hangwoman came for the landlord," Mrs. Tsernov explained, as she poured brandy into both glasses. "If you'd come through the other side of the village, you would have seen what's left of the manor after she burned it. They loved to see the landlord hang, you know, because they all hated him. And they pillaged his larders--first the bandits, then the villagers. That was in the fall. Before the snows came."

She pushed one glass towards Leopold, and then drank her own in one breathless swig. 

"But fall was a long time ago," Mrs. Tsernov said, "and the cellars are empty now. They are free of the landlord's ledger, but they are just now learning the price of freedom in Tyvia."

Leopold's fingers curled around the glass of brandy. The liquid was clear, but had a stinging smell. He didn't drink yet; Mrs. Tsernov noticed how slim and graceful Leopold's fingers were. The hands of a pianist, or a doctor. Some sort of city profession. She wondered how those delicate city hands got him into twelve years' worth of trouble.

"Would they hang a stranger, like they did the landlord?" Leopold asked, unsettled.

"Dear boy... dear boy, it's not the hanging you have to fear, it's the hunger," she said, voice coming out in an exhausted rasp. "Don't you understand? It's the hunger."

He didn't understand.

 

* * *

 

They took the dead Watchmen's horses and rode into the wilds, following their secret signposts until they reached the first safehouse.

It was a cramped little hole, dug into the ground during the few summer months when the ground hadn't been frozen solid, but the clay hearth was stocked with firewood, and they had a roaring fire going by the time anyone spoke.

"We can't kill the baron," Ulrik said, his eyes roving wild with a perpetual sort of panic. 

Yelena did not respond at first. Her left hand was on her lap, and she inspected the mark on the back of her hand even as the others did everything they could to avert their eyes. There were common blasphemies that all bandits stooped to--the bonecharms, the altars, even the secret rituals to call on the Outsider's favor--but this was something they sensed to be far beyond their usual amateur dabbling with black magic. This was something dangerous.

"Yes, we can," Yelena said after a short while.

They were huddled as close to the hearth as possible, and perhaps subconsciously, away from Yelena. Two days ago, they would not have shied like this. They'd all at some point joked with her, teased her, even pinched her if they were drunk or daring enough, and all they had had to fear was her mortal wrath. But two days ago, she had only been Yelena, the woman married to the leader of their band.

Now Yelena had died and come back something altogether different. They'd seen her hang, and they'd seen her slip the noose, and they all believed her when she said she could kill the baron, not because it was a boast, but because she uttered it as simple fact, the way one might remark that the snows were coming soon. How could they believe otherwise?

A smile slowly curled Yelena's lips, a slow unfurling expression which revealed her canines.

Vanya, who was in the middle of stoking the fire, cast her a nervous look, and then his eyes roamed around the small room, trying to gauge the others' discomfiture. He was at least reassured that none of them were completely at ease.

"We are going to have to recruit," Yelena said, "now that Erik is dead and his territory passed to me."

Her husband was most certainly not dead--not for nothing, but they'd all clearly seen his rapid getaway as the Watchmen closed in--but nobody thought he'd be showing his face around these parts ever again, so this was not a point they were willing to argue. But they were also hesitant to say anything else, unsure of what road they'd end up going down if they did.

"You're bleeding," Ulrik said suddenly.

Yelena blinked, as if jarred out of her thoughts, but then her expression grew annoyed, and she shrugged off her coat and the woolen cardigan beneath.

They hadn't noticed it, not in the rush to get away and then in the half-light of the safehouse, but there was a gash along her upper arm, and when she pulled her coat off, the black clot of blood began trickling red again, soaking her white shirt down the sleeve.

"One of them bastards must've been quicker than I realized," she said. "Got to learn to use this thing better, if we're going to the baron," she said, gesturing at the Mark.

"I'll stitch it for you," Ulrik said, clambering to his feet. The ceiling was low enough that he had to bend over slightly, but he bustled towards the door, to get any supplies from the saddlebags.

The tension broke after that. Septimo went outside after Ulrik, to fill a kettle with snow and put water to boil. Vanya and Arran made room for Yelena closest to the hearth, where the fire from the open heart hatch would give Ulrik more light to stitch by. Yelena ripped the sleeve of her shirt wider, unpeeling the fabric from the wound.

"There's a, um... a pair of brothers over in Saska village," Vanya offered, a bit abruptly. "Good shots, know when to keep their mouths shut. Since we're recruiting..." He trailed off, and looked to Arran.

"And Red Bess recently put out feelers," Arran added, more hesitantly. "Fencing isn't working out so well for her, she wants back in the action."

"That's a good start," Yelena nodded. 

And suddenly, just like that, she was human again, bleeding and feeling as any one of them.

 

* * *

 

Leopold knew his time with the Tsernovs had come to an end when Mr. Tsernov burst into the kitchen, wild-eyed and panicked. The old man knelt despite every joint in his legs cracking, and he took out the thick fur coat from under the bed.

"You must go," Mr. Tsernov spoke quickly, tossing the bundled up coat to Leopold. "She's keeping them talking, but they know you're here. They saw the tracks in the snow."

Leopold pulled the coat on quickly. Almost as an afterthought, Mr. Tsernov took a woolly hat hanging on a hook by the door, and handed this to Leopold as well as he pushed the younger man through the door.

"But where do I--" Leopold started, fear running down his spine colder than the winter chill.

"There is a hunting cabin in the woods," Mr. Tsernov said quickly. "It belonged to the landlord, once. Go straight the way you came, take a left when you reach the jagged stone. You'll see it when you emerge from the trees. Go! Go!"

So Leopold went. He pulled the woolly cap hastily over his ears, and trudged through the snow as fast as his feet allowed. He'd been given a good pair of boots, so his feet did now feel like frozen stumps this time. He made good time.

It seemed he walked for a long time nonetheless, and he was almost afraid he'd gotten lost when he finally came across a stone jutting out of the ground, a jagged mountain in miniature aimed for the sky like the fang of some Pandyssian monster. He took a left, along a pathway cut through the trees, and he emerged to the hunting cabin.

He'd expected a more ostentatious thing, when Mr. Tsernov said it had belonged to the landlord, but he realized now that these rural backwaters had different a different concept for wealth than the lamplit cities Leopold was used to. The cabin was a single room, with a large bed, and hardy furniture, and a fireplace.

Hunting trophies covered the walls, the heads of snarling and antlered creatures of all stripes staring down. A bearskin rug was spread out on the floor in front of the fireplace. Wood was still stacked, ready to burn, so Leopold started a roaring fire. Exhausted, he fell asleep rolled up in the bearskin rug.

Under the glass eyes of the mounted trophies, he dreamed. He dreamed also of eyes, accusingly staring down.

Had the Tsernovs gotten in trouble because of him? He was in court once again in his dreams, on the stand, his accusers screaming at him with spittle flying from their mouths. They were not screaming of his victims, however, but of the Tsernovs being dead.

In his dream, they broke his fingers so he would never hold a scalpel again. Strangely, he knew this part was not real, but despite this small measure of lucidity, he was convinced it was actually showing him the future, and that if it hadn't happened yet, it would happen soon.

He woke to the eyes on the walls, flinching awake in a cold sweat. The fire was still going in the fireplace, flickering shadows across the sinister expressions of the room's dead occupants.

He still had his fingers, Leopold assured himself. He would be a doctor again.

He rolled up tighter in the bearskin, like it could protect him from the harshness of the world.

 

* * *

 

Yelena drank the wine deeply, like it was lifeblood.

She didn't feel the cold anymore, curiously. Now that she thought about it, she hadn't really felt it since the noose had been around her throat. But the wine warmed her sweetly, and she passed the bottle on to Septimo.

She was down to her shirtsleeves, while everyone else was bundled up in their furs. It frightened people to see her that way, and she wondered at times if she was dead now. It would have made a perverse sense. She could pass through walls like a ghost, and with a flare of her Mark, become immaterial to bullets and arrows and swords. As long as she could hold her breath, nothing would touch her.

But she felt everything else just fine. Wine tasted like it ought to.

Blood tasted differently.

Before, she'd been happy enough to separate fools from their purses, rough them up, but she'd always balked at outright killing.

Now, coin brought only the taste of ash to her mouth. She wanted the blood of every last landed lord who'd ever squeezed their fortune from the common masses. No plunder would satisfy her, unless she made sure at least one of the wealthy scum hanged as she took it from them. 

She called it justice. Not to the ones who followed her, because they understood it viscerally, without explanation. They'd grown up in Tyvia as well, and knew the prices it extracted from those least likely to have anything to give. Yelena remembered her family begging the local land owner for food every winter, and then all through summer having to neglect their own fields to pay the debt to him, and never being able to grow enough food to last them through the winter even once. The debt compounded, year after year, until their own patch of land lay fallow every year as they worked a rich man's field. The year Yelena realized it was never going to be any different, she left her home and dowry behind, and took with the hills with her brash new husband.

Desperation was a way of life in these parts of Tyvia. Out in the wilds, inside tree hollows, in caves or behind waterfalls, people would build their little shrines, and leave the runes to the Outsider. Mad desperate hope, and superstition. But Yelena knelt at those altars like the maddest of them, and to her, the Outsider actually spoke.

"Do you think you're doing them a kindness, Yelena?" he asked with his Void-black eyes trained on her. "Do you think they thank you after the slaughter you bring to their villages?"

Hanging was a bloodless death, as those went, but Yelena tasted blood nonetheless. It was sweet like summer wine. She remembered the taste when she thought back on every hanging. Satisfaction, after a life of nothing ever being enough.

"Yes," she whispered to the sound of an ocean she had never seen. 

When she hanged one of them, she always looked into the crowds, and she could always recognize the faces of those who liked the taste of the blood she was spilling for them. She saw their smiles, their delighted eyes. 

"Is it justice, or revenge?"

She remembered the sneering smile of her executioner, as he invited her to be fitted for the noose, and she could not see the difference.

"It's neither," she said. "It's what's right."

The Outsider did not smile. He was not the executioner the Abbey painted him as, but Yelena thought perhaps he knew the noose as well as she did.

Yet how could he understand the deep groove of hatred the landed rich had worn into Yelena's very soul, with day after day of indignity and exhaustion, with generation after generation of parents too tired to show their children love? Like a starving animal gorging itself for the first time in its life, Yelena filled that groove with blood until it made her sick, and did not know how to stop.

 

* * *

 

Two days, Leopold hid at the hunting cabin.

On the first morning, he scoured the entire building to find food. It had a cellar, and the cellar had evidently had food in it once, but it seemed someone had just beaten him to it, and plundered everything edible in it. Perhaps it had even been the Tsernovs, Leopold considered with lukewarm optimism, as he contemplated the empty meathooks which may have once held actual meat.

The trip to the cellar proved not to be a complete failure, because he caught a rat while he was down there. He flung himself to catch the wretched creature, and he broke its neck when it tried to bite his hands.

The cabin at least had salt and some herbs left in its dusty cabinets, and it made the rat much more palatable. As it was roasting on a spit in the fireplace, Leopold even found the smell appetizing, though that might have just been the hunger.

He considered hunting, but dismissed the thought after he evaluated his performance with the rat. He would need food, and suddenly the gruel they served in prison did not seem so bad.

By the end of the second day, when he'd resorted to making a stew out of boiled leather and rat leftover, he decided this could not stand. What would it hurt if he returned to the Tsernovs? Surely nobody would think he'd be stupid enough to return after almost being caught once.

He shed his old prison coat, stashing it in the cabin. It wasn't much good at keeping him warm, anyway. He found some old hunting clothes in the cabin instead. No winter boots, but he did have the old pair the Tsernovs had given him, and the woolly cap that kept his ears warm. On a whim, before heading out, he pulled on the bearskin rug and tied it around his shoulder over his fur coat. It hid the bloodstain on the back of the collar, at least, and it was warm. A bit awkward to wear, but he tied it in place with some rope and tried not to think about how silly he looked.

Less whim and more deliberate, he took a hatchet as well, hanging it on his belt loop. He didn't know what he was walking into, but better safe than sorry.

He re-traced his path back to the Tsernovs' house slowly, more out of hesitation than because of the snow. The path seemed shorted than he remembered it when he'd been headed the other way, but it still gave him enough time to reconsider his course of action a dozen times over.

He was almost startled when he emerged from the trees and saw the Tsernovs' little house before him. He took a moment to recall if it was the right place, because he'd not gotten a very good look at it from the outside, but swallowing down the last of his hesitation, he approached the kitchen door.

He stared at it for much too long before deciding to knock, and he did so quietly, waiting for an answer. All the windows were dark and quiet. There was not a stir from inside, and something told Leopold he should not be making too much noise. Instead, he twisted the door handle, and it opened--perhaps out here in the villages, people didn't bother to lock their doors.

The inside of the house was quiet, but also freezing cold, and Leopold felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The Tsernovs' house had been nothing but warm when he'd been here, and now, the fire had long since guttered out in the hearth.

Was it hope, or a morbid curiosity that drove him forward? Surely he already guessed what had happened to the couple by that point, but his feet could not help but move forward. 

He stepped into the hallway, and the door to the cellar was wide open. Muddy footprints, tracking dirt to and from the cellar, tracked a path all the way to the front door, which had been left open. That explained the cold, but not who and why had raided the Tsernovs' cellar.

So Leopold went on, past the front door.

No snow had fallen in two days, and so nothing had covered the patch of blood on the front doorstep, where it seemed someone's head had hit against a step. Leopold observed with medical detachment as he made this conclusion, feeling his mind floating somewhere far above his body as he kept walking.

Out through the gate and onto the village road, Leopold could see the tamped down snow where many feet had passed at once, and followed the trail into the clump of houses that the Tsernovs had called the village. He walked the road with his head down, focused on those footprints, on the streaks of frozen blood that he could sometimes spot like gleaming rubies amid the dirty, churned-over snow.

In the center of the village, it was impossible to tell which way the feet might have gone after leaving the Tsernovs' house, but Leopold walked on. 

Faces peered at him from windows. Whispers brought curious onlookers onto their doorsteps, then up to their gates, then passing through the gates, walking after Leopold with hushed voices and significant looks. Someone had a rifle, someone else had an axe. Leopold took no heed.

He walked past the village and towards the charred skeleton of an old country manor. Its front steps, solid stone, had been blackened but still stood stout.

Here the villagers had erected their shrine to the Outsider, hoisting the skull of an ox on the still-standing doorframe, draping rich purple cloth that had to have belonged to the landowner once, perhaps looted from his home as he died. Bunches of dry herbs and dead flowers, strings in colorful hues, carved ivory.

Down, on the steps of the shrine, runes and bonecharms. 

One of the bonecharms was tied together with a braided string of slate-gray hair, the shade familiar after the days he spent with Mrs. Tsernov. Placed like an offering, the Tsernovs' wedding rings were next to the bonecharm.

Leopold breathed in slowly, then exhaled.

He knelt. It was not for the Outsider that he knelt, but nonetheless, the world washed away like a message on the sand when the tide came in. It was him, and the shrine, and the voice to his ear, intimate as the scalpel's hilt.

"Death is an old friend of yours, Leopold," the Outsider spoke. "Surely you're not upset it dropped in for a visit?"

If it was meant to be mockery, or if it was meant to make him hurt for what he'd done, Leopold no longer cared.

It had seemed important once, to decide who lived and who died. A small adjustment of the dosage, an innocuous slip of the knife, and how easy it was to remove a corrupt official, an alcoholic molester, an abusive Overseer. They'd called him a monster, when he'd done it all with such skill and delicacy and empathy. They truly never understood how frail the human body was.

Now he realized he never understood either, that good people died just as easily as the bad ones. Easier.

"Will it be worth dying to know the truth?" the Outsider asked. "Wasting the Tsernovs' sacrifice so that you can satisfy your curiosity? Turn around, Leopold. They're still hungry. The Tsernovs were old and stringy, but you're younger meat, and now they have the taste for it."

The words stirred Leopold out of the haze he'd been stuck in, and he looked to the Outsider for the first time. Black eyes stared at him out of a pale face, and he thought he heard a whale song somewhere in the distance.

"Ah, there's the fear," the Outsider said, scrutinizing Leopold's expression and apparently finding something very amusing in it. "But you'll need more than that to survive."

The back of Leopold's hand itched, and then burned. 

When Leopold was finally back to himself, the Void receding its icy grip on his mind, his hand was already wrapped around the hatchet on his belt.

People died so easily, Leopold thought, bile rising to his throat. One didn't even need a scalpel to break them apart.

 

* * *

 

"Shouldn't linger here," Red Bess grunted. "It's the Bear King's territory."

"I think I've been through here before," Yelena said, and spurred her mount forward. The mountain goat resentfully stopped chewing the bark off a tree as it moved closed to the abandoned houses.

Somewhere past them, there was the song of a rune. Yelena's posse didn't much care for that stuff; Red Bess used to deal in runes sometimes, back in her fencing days, but she and the other half dozen bandits trailing after Yelena hadn't lived as long as they did by poking at bears. Not literal ones, at least.

"I wonder what happened here," Septimo said, less out of genuine interest and more to fill the eerie quiet surrounding them.

Forest quiet was different from abandoned village quiet, so they couldn't help being disconcerted as they passed house after house with windows broken and uncleared snow, their fences and gates rotting apart.

There was a shrine on the doorsteps of what might have once been a large house, or a manor. Unlike the rest of the village, this one looked like it was lovingly maintained, and a rune hummed atop it, luring Yelena closer.

"Do bears build shrines to the Outsider?" Yelena asked, mouth slanting in a strange smile. 

"Heard the Bear King turns into a man sometimes," Red Bess said.

Yelena took a long look at the shrine, judging the shapes of the bones it was built from against any possible animal they might have come from. She didn't like the conclusion she was forced to draw.

"Bear King doesn't like people much, does he?" Yelena asked, her tone sardonic even as she was sure that was completely true.

Red Bess opened her mouth to reply--something biting, no doubt, or something true--but the moment stopped. It stretched. It greyed out the world.

Time froze around Yelena, for everyone but her, and the Mark on her hand flared acidly, sending prickling pain up her arm as it wrenched the flow of her time to a different rhythm.

She blinked out of the saddle just in time for the hatchet to come down on her mountain goat's head, and when she twisted on her heel to face her attacker, her pistol was already out. 

She thought, at first, that it might be a real bear, despite the irrational idea that a bear might know how to use a hatchet. But when he turned around, he was nothing but a crazed man in a bearskin, his eyes rimmed with red, a tangled blond beard splitting to reveal a yellow-toothed sneer.

Yelena lost five of her men that day, but two monsters limped away from that fight, still alive and neither one better for it. And had she understood her role in creating both those monsters, Yelena still would not have cared to change.


End file.
